Tvinci completes strong 12 months with MediaCorp deal

MediaCorp has selected Tvinci, the Pay-OTT platform provider, to power its Toggle service, which makes linear TV and VOD available on the PC, iPhone, iPad and connected TV devices as a subscription or PPV offer. This confirms Tvinci’s ambition to expand into Asia-Pacific and wraps up an impressive 12 months for the company, whose platform is also being used by Chellomedia to power an online movie service in the Netherlands.

MediaCorp’s Toggle service will be fully launched in Singapore this quarter and is said to be a first of its kind for the country, enabling a leading media company to compete with local operators by creating a paid TV service. Toggle will be rolled out internationally later.

“Consumers are increasingly using connected devices both as companion devices and as second screens, and so we made a strategic decision to make Toggle not only a direct way for them to watch MediaCorp content anytime and anywhere, but also a gateway to a brand new TV experience,” states Philip Koh, Managing Director, Convergent Media Division at MediaCorp. “Tvinci’s team demonstrated great technical acumen through the quality and speed at which Toggle has been developed and launched.”

Toggle provides rights protected content across iOS, Android and Windows devices using Tvinci’s multi-DRM capabilities. It supports Microsoft PlayReady and Google’s Widevine DRM simultaneously, depending on the device. Toggle is described as a cross-device lifestyle service and includes social TV features. The Tvinci platform allows Toggle users to rate, share and interact around TV shows, with Twitter and Facebook integrated into the service from the backend level to the interface.

Tvinci provides the market with a unified multi-screen offering that encompasses everything from content management through device and DRM management to analytics/reporting, social media integration and user experience management. Having made its mark with its original Orange Israel deployment, the company has been growing steadily. It now numbers 50 people.

In September last year Tvinci announced that Chellomedia, the international content division of Liberty Global, is using its OTT TV platform to power an online movie service from Film1, the Dutch premium television service. In November it announced that Finnish telco Elisa is using its platform to deliver the EpicTV pan-European extreme sports VOD service to Apple iPads.

Tvinci recently announced a $4.5 million investment, with the money earmarked for further R&D and to explore new market opportunities. The MediaCorp deal is the first Tvinci deployment in Asia-Pacific and the company says it is now looking for further expansion in the region.  One of the areas where the company differentiates itself, according to Ido Wiesenberg, Co-Founder & VP Business Development, is the extent to which its platform supports a fully integrated, cross-device user experience, plus time-to-market (customers are typically ‘on air’ in 3-6 months, he says).

In demonstrations, Tvinci has been showing some of the advanced multi-screen features consumers will now appreciate, including a list of connected clients within a subscriber home that can be fed with content, and then the ability to session-shift between those devices. This includes the classic ‘swoosh’ gesture that sends not only the content but also your personal profile from a tablet to a set-top box, for example. This means that where a log-in is needed, you can log-in on a device best designed for this action (with a keyboard, like a tablet or smartphone) and then decide which device you want to use for consumption.

If the content discovery journey evolves as predicted, with more of the search and discovery activity performed on companion devices and more emphasis on social interaction, yet a continued desire for lean-back television, this ease of transition between various devices in a connected home will become very valuable. “This is the future,” says Wiesenberg of this approach to companion/consumption activities.

According to Wiesenberg, the next step for service providers who have already deployed multi-screen TV is to make services more personal. Supporting and encouraging companion screen activities, like social TV with personal identifiers, is one way to achieve this, helping operators to address everyone in the home as an individual in addition to serving TV at a household level.